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Expectation is subjective. Your opinion on the expectations of the community is doubly subjective. What's your reasoning for saying that expectations have not risen?

>snip<

An example would be Age of Empires Online (what a way to kill a franchise)

But anyways, AoEO is really just a RTS with a lobby system. You have your "home city" which is just a lobby to either do, solo quest, or play multiplayer with up 2-4 people... how is that a MMO?!!?

But by todays standards.. it is.

That's a completely different topic. I'm talking about what you created this thread to discuss: whether or not MMO players have higher expectations now than we did back then. The looser criteria for being considered an MMO is moot.

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Expectation is subjective. Your opinion on the expectations of the community is doubly subjective. What's your reasoning for saying that expectations have not risen?

>snip<

An example would be Age of Empires Online (what a way to kill a franchise)

But anyways, AoEO is really just a RTS with a lobby system. You have your "home city" which is just a lobby to either do, solo quest, or play multiplayer with up 2-4 people... how is that a MMO?!!?

But by todays standards.. it is.

That's a completely different topic. I'm talking about what you created this thread to discuss: whether or not MMO players have higher expectations now than we did back then. The looser criteria for being considered an MMO is moot.

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Agree with OP and am hoping EQNext (or whatever they decide to finally name it) is to a large degree a reskin of EQ.

Also want to add how funny it is to me it's always the same 3 people...mostly (Only 1 of which I've seen post in here...so far) that feel the need to constantly rain on any old school MMO threads parade when they could easily just ignore it and move on. Seems they are on a personal mission to be sure no one gets what they want but them....despite a much larger crowd seeking these than they may think.

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My arguement is that I don't have high expectations, I just expect to have at LEAST what we had 10 years ago.

But alot of people here on the forum say "we have to high of expectations from the devs" and my answer is nooo, with current tech. and the amount of people in the MMO market, that the current MMO-Lite crowed have very very very low expectations from where we were 10 years ago.

True we seem to want the same thing yet I do consider myself having high expectations because of all the feature's I miss from the old and would want them back but with high end graphics as in MMO standards as we aint there yet compared to singleplayer graphics.

To be honost if I didn't consider myself to have high expectations I am sure I would still be playing some of the older MMORPG's, I just can't I too have been spoiled, SWG spoiled me with the freedom and it's feature's and player made content no MMORPG I played or tried has even come close. I want those same things but with today´s graphics, sorry that´s allot to ask for thus giving me high expectations.

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Then why can't you play it now unless the graphics are better? Higher expectations? (I'm asking this as someone who played FFXI for a few years at release and then resubscribed last year.)

I played FFXI from the start of the NA launch (I think it was 2003?), and I played untill around 2006 where I quite because of school...and it was just taking to much of my time, (literally 5-8 hrs a day)"

I came back in 2010 (I think thats what it was) and with the Abyssea expansion the whole game changed (and not for the better IMO), I tried to play for a while, but the new expansion + the really small population + dated graphics + FFXIV announced, I just had a hard time staying interested.

I still loved going back and doing the old school stuff, (grinding in the dunes, exploring area's and what-not), but the population was so low in those areas you just couldn't get a party. Most people just leveled to max in a week or so with the Abyssea leveling system..

...anyways it still makes me kinda sad, but it doesn't change the fact that we have moved backwards options/complexity wise in the last 10 years.

We're in roughly the same boat there. I also played from launch til about 2006, and my main mode of play now that I've returned is "doing the old school stuff" with a small group of friends rather than doing a fast-track powerlevel on the content designed to do exactly that.

But here's where my view differs from yours. I remember back when the game launched, people had a lot of things to gripe about. Jobs were imbalanced. Parties took too long to form because they were too job dependent. Quests and missions required walkthroughs because they were too vague or required unreasonable leaps of logic. The easiest and most accessible camp spots were overcrowded, because faraway difficult zones weren't feasible for pickup parties. High level parties often fought the same exact models of enemies (not even palette-swapped!) that they fought in the newbie zone, which only added to the monotony of the grind. Travelling from place to place was inconvenient even when it wasn't hazardous. New abilities came far too infrequently for non-mage jobs. Inventory space was very limited. Travelling around was inconvenient even when it wasn't dangerous. The interface was clunky. Alt-tabbing and windowed mode weren't allowed. PlayOnline made logging in take forever, and made billing confusing. I'm not even scratching the surface with this list.

Now, most of these things are things that I don't mind. But there were people who did. They minded them a lot. And they kept playing anyway. That's what I mean when I say that expectations have risen. Back then, you could make a game that had all of these... "frustrations", and people would still flock to the game and stick with it for years. That doesn't happen so much anymore. You'll see someone on these forums cry "Why don't they make a game where you can do X, Y, and Z!?" And when someone responds "Well, Such-and-Such game has all of those features", they just say "Oh, the characters aren't customizable enough in that game" or "I don't like the anime-ish art style" or "The housing is instanced" or "I don't like that you can't swim." If a game doesn't have EVERYTHING you want, it's not worth playing.

Can you imagine if people felt that way in 1999? If people were unwilling to settle for a game that had some features they didn't like, how many subscribers do you think EQ would've had? 50? 20?

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well said OP. Regression of systems in new games is bullshit. Each new iteration is dumbed down from previous games. Less options, less complexity, less variation. It's awful. It's like being forced to watch either old reruns, or sesame street. That's the choice these days.

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Disdena brings up a number of good points.

The OP mentions playing the old school games for 5-8 hours at a pop. Game developers have realized that a lot of people who might otherwise play (and buy) their games, can't do this with any regularity. I think the OP underestimates the amount of money that would need to be spent to 'modernize' the old school game; art, animation, coding, etc; that has to be paid for, usually upfront, and a resonable return on investment has to be there. As Disdena points out, many of these games had serious problems. Bad launches, poor coding, giant chunks that worked poorly or not at all, now substandard art or animation. Is it 'higher expectations' to want a return to THAT? SWG had character classes that never worked right. UO had continual, massive changes, because things didn't work the way the developers intended. And that was not due to them wanting UO to be a WoW-clone.

The proposed game has to bring in a profit for the people making it. Until it can be shown there's a real market, all you'll see is small, independant companies doing these types of games, usually with attendant serious issues.

If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.

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Originally posted by Arglebargle

Disdena brings up a number of good points.

The OP mentions playing the old school games for 5-8 hours at a pop. Game developers have realized that a lot of people who might otherwise play (and buy) their games, can't do this with any regularity. I think the OP underestimates the amount of money that would need to be spent to 'modernize' the old school game; art, animation, coding, etc; that has to be paid for, usually upfront, and a resonable return on investment has to be there. As Disdena points out, many of these games had serious problems. Bad launches, poor coding, giant chunks that worked poorly or not at all, now substandard art or animation. Is it 'higher expectations' to want a return to THAT? SWG had character classes that never worked right. UO had continual, massive changes, because things didn't work the way the developers intended. And that was not due to them wanting UO to be a WoW-clone.

The proposed game has to bring in a profit for the people making it. Until it can be shown there's a real market, all you'll see is small, independant companies doing these types of games, usually with attendant serious issues.

Not everyone values the heavily iterized bug free games. In fact some of my favorite games of all time inlcuding Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina have some insane glitches in them.

I would rather a company bite off more then it can chew then serve me something I have seen many times before but dressed slightly differently.

I value the imagination of the SWG classes even if creature handler was never balanced correctly and was frequently very glitchy. I want that depth of a game and I wish people like you would not say that a large company has no chance in doing a large scope of design just because of resources.

I think a large reason why game development costs so much has been the rapid development of large scale graphics. Eventually I think graphic engines will stabilize in how high they can go and development costs will be less because of all the iterations from other developers can be built upon instead of having to be relearned because of new tech. In this regard I think new tech has hurt game development but because I believe graphical tech is on the end of its cycle, we should see new graphics becoming cheaper over time.

Perhaps a larger portion of bugbet being spent on game system development rather then graphics will actually produce better games? Time will tell.

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Originally posted by Arglebargle

Disdena brings up a number of good points.

The OP mentions playing the old school games for 5-8 hours at a pop. Game developers have realized that a lot of people who might otherwise play (and buy) their games, can't do this with any regularity. I think the OP underestimates the amount of money that would need to be spent to 'modernize' the old school game; art, animation, coding, etc; that has to be paid for, usually upfront, and a resonable return on investment has to be there. As Disdena points out, many of these games had serious problems. Bad launches, poor coding, giant chunks that worked poorly or not at all, now substandard art or animation. Is it 'higher expectations' to want a return to THAT? SWG had character classes that never worked right. UO had continual, massive changes, because things didn't work the way the developers intended. And that was not due to them wanting UO to be a WoW-clone.

The proposed game has to bring in a profit for the people making it. Until it can be shown there's a real market, all you'll see is small, independant companies doing these types of games, usually with attendant serious issues.

We are not disagreeing here, I do admit most people don't have 5-8hrs to play, (I don't anymore) And I know it would take a fair amount of money to "modernize" older MMO's..

But the point of my OP was, expectations have not risen. if anything we expect less from games.

In the old days, we expected player housing

we expected in-depth crafting

we expected a good varity of classes

we expected a large world

....now days the newer games rarely have any of those features, and if they do its touted as some great accomplishment, some feet that was really difficult, that no game has ever done before.

look at the hype around Archeage... looks to be a awesome game. but does it really have anything that EQ didn't have?

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I would rather a company bite off more then it can chew then serve me something I have seen many times before but dressed slightly differently.

But the company will lose their shirt if they do so. People don't like to buy buggy products.

For me, good implementation is more important than the idea. There are lot of sequels which are fun games. It is about poilsh and making the details right .. not doing something different for the shake of it.

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It's a generational shift mostly. The people who were playing MMO's 10 years ago were typically in their 20's and 30's (not all obviously, but that was the demographic). Those same people are now in their 30's and 40's, and their children are just starting to hit their teens and up, meaning there's a big influx of younger players to the genre, and thier expectations are all very different. They are growing up with constant internet access, hi definition graphics on large TV screens, and bewildering selection of gaming choices on everything from consoles to their phones.

My point is, younger people are growing up in a world where gaming isn't a hobby as much as it is just another part of their life. They don't expect MMO's to be what older players expect them to be anymore than you and I don't eat 90% of our meals expecting to be served a cuisine. A cuisine might taste better, but we are only really eating because it's just one of many things we do (and often enjoy), like shaving or playing basketball or having sex: we may love to do many things but we do not expect every one of them to be some kind of lifechanging event, usually because we do them so often that they become routine.

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Oh, never mind.

Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

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A lot of games made circa 2002-2003 are still around, and have been continuously worked on / improved by both dev and community. Graphics are a moving target. It seems like you are asking for a re-skinned version of an older game; why not play one of the classics still in operation instead?

"To be what you are not, experience what you are not." -Saint John of the CrossAuthored 110 missions in VendettaOnlineCheck it out on Steam

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This reminds me of a phenomena I sometimes encounter. I spent most of my childhood living in communist Poland before emigrating a few years before the fall of communism. Every so often I encounter people who want a return of those days. They are willing to once again put up with the bad things if they can again experience the things they liked about that era. I have generally fond memories of my childhood but I would never want to return to those times and consider the idea insane.

I view the old-school nostalgia the same way. I put up with a lot of stupid stuff back in those days to play MMORPGs and I am not willing to put up with them again.

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The problem with wanting what we had 10 years ago is really not what we want. Let me try and explain.

Example: I want the community feeling back in MMOs where you had server pride and people didn't just stick to their guilds for their social interactions. EQ gave me that with open dungeons where people would chat and help each other out. Something that lacks with the birth of instances. Friendships were made at the docks waiting on boats because you had to pass the time doing something, while getting your fishing skill up. EQ had tons of things like that, that helped foster a more community oriented game.

As much as I want the above, I don't want corpse runs back, I don't want rediculous timesinks that makes me inactive for 20 minutes at a time because I have to wait for a boat. I don't want to sit in one spot pulling the same 5 mobs over and over and over doing the same repetitive action I could probably macro on a timer. I don't want open dungeons where there's competiton over camp spots forcing you to be put on some arbitrary list that could be a mile long.

TLDR: I want the positive from days old but none of the negative. Unfortunally those go hand in hand

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But the point of my OP was, expectations have not risen. if anything we expect less from games.

In the old days, we expected player housing

we expected in-depth crafting

we expected a good varity of classes

we expected a large world

....now days the newer games rarely have any of those features, and if they do its touted as some great accomplishment, some feet that was really difficult, that no game has ever done before.

I'm still waiting for some examples of this. Can you name an MMO from the old days that did poorly because it lacked one of those features? You can't say people expected those features if they were happily playing games that lacked those features.

Back then, MMO developers could put whatever mix of features into a game, and people would play it as long as it appealed to them in some way and was polished at least to the point of being playable. Over time, as more and more MMOs came out, some of them had a large world but bad crafting, some had good crafting but no housing, etc. As people saw a more diverse playing field, they no longer had to put up with games that had features they didn't like or lacked features that they cared about.

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I'd like to weigh in if I may. I'm an oldschool UO player and it's something I've thought/talked about extensively.

The PROBLEM with the current MMO scene is both the community's expectations and the lack of balls from developers to put out something with high risk/reward. There's no question that the market is inundated with WoW clones and all-around generic games with nothing new to offer. GW2 is a great example of this. It's hailed as innovative and groundbreaking but at its core there really isn't much different from any other game. It just looks better, the mundane quests you have to do don't show up in any quest log and instead of a pvp arena, they have WvW.

Unfortunately because of community expectations I don't think a good, creative, harcore, whatever type of game would do well even if somebody did make it. Take Darkfall for example. On paper it's essentially UO mixed with Shadowbane............... and it failed. You can talk all day about features that were promised/never delivered, or the grind or whatever but the bottom line is if you compare it to UO (especially early UO), Darkfall had MUCH more going for it objectively. The problem is when we played these great games ~10 years ago, we didn't have countless forums to go complain about things we didn't like, or complain about balance of a certain skill/class/etc so we just kind of put up with the slight imperfections and ENJOYED THE GAME.

The new generation will NOT be satisfied by any game imo because they don't feel they have to put up with anything they may not like.

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Originally posted by JeremyBowyer

Unfortunately because of community expectations I don't think a good, creative, harcore, whatever type of game would do well even if somebody did make it. Take Darkfall for example. On paper it's essentially UO mixed with Shadowbane............... and it failed. You can talk all day about features that were promised/never delivered, or the grind or whatever but the bottom line is if you compare it to UO (especially early UO), Darkfall had MUCH more going for it objectively. The problem is when we played these great games ~10 years ago, we didn't have countless forums to go complain about things we didn't like, or complain about balance of a certain skill/class/etc so we just kind of put up with the slight imperfections and ENJOYED THE GAME.

The new generation will NOT be satisfied by any game imo because they don't feel they have to put up with anything they may not like.

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I'd like to weigh in if I may. I'm an oldschool UO player and it's something I've thought/talked about extensively.

The PROBLEM with the current MMO scene is both the community's expectations and the lack of balls from developers to put out something with high risk/reward. There's no question that the market is inundated with WoW clones and all-around generic games with nothing new to offer. GW2 is a great example of this. It's hailed as innovative and groundbreaking but at its core there really isn't much different from any other game. It just looks better, the mundane quests you have to do don't show up in any quest log and instead of a pvp arena, they have WvW.

Unfortunately because of community expectations I don't think a good, creative, harcore, whatever type of game would do well even if somebody did make it. Take Darkfall for example. On paper it's essentially UO mixed with Shadowbane............... and it failed. You can talk all day about features that were promised/never delivered, or the grind or whatever but the bottom line is if you compare it to UO (especially early UO), Darkfall had MUCH more going for it objectively. The problem is when we played these great games ~10 years ago, we didn't have countless forums to go complain about things we didn't like, or complain about balance of a certain skill/class/etc so we just kind of put up with the slight imperfections and ENJOYED THE GAME.

The new generation will NOT be satisfied by any game imo because they don't feel they have to put up with anything they may not like.

So your saying now we have forums to complain about the game instead of playing it, so every game seems bad?

I would reverse that arguement and say that we have forums because games are bad, trust me we had forums 10 years ago.. I was even a part of one for FFXI, but I was rarely on it.... why? because I spent all of my free time IN THE GAME!

the reason I'm on the forum now instead of playing a game? because none of them hold my interest, its become more fun to talk/argue about a game, then actually play it. THAT should say something about the state of gaming.